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Dec 06, 2023 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Mikael Kennedy

Earlier this year, LA-based musician and visual artist Malena Cadiz debuted their third full-length album, Hellbent & Moonbound. Arriving seven years after her 2016 album, Sunfair, the record finds her turning her magnetic storytelling and folk-tinged songwriting into a lush studio affair. “There is a pretty long history of iconic LA albums that I wanted this to fit into.” says the album’s producer, Andrew Lappin. “Anything from the 60s (Beach Boys) to 70s Neil Young albums like “On the Beach,” to Harry Nilsson, up through Fleetwood Mac and into the 90s and early 2000s (Jon Brion, Aimee Mann). I wanted to make the next in the line of those classic, quintessential L.A. records.”

This week, she performed the record in full at a release show at Gold-Diggers in East Hollywood and she’s following today with a new video for one of the album’s highlights, “Shatter,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Shatter” is a sun-dappled folk rock ramble, one that encapsulates both Cadiz’s plaintive songwriting and her breezy charms. Chugging acoustic chords and winding pedal steel initially give the track a pastoral undercurrent but it soon settles into an easygoing groove, centered around Cadiz’s warm and earthen vocal melodies. Lines can be drawn between Cadiz and contemporaries like Sharon Van Etten, Cat Power, or Angel Olsen, but her vocals and songwriting also shine with their own luster, especially when shaded in the album’s consciously crafted golden hour sheen. Lyrically, the track is about a search for truth, and the video plays into that theme, finding Cadiz playing detective as they wander through LA’s streets in the waning light of sunset.

Cadiz says of the track and video, “‘Shatter’ is about a longing to know the center and feel the truth of things. As in the subjective “truth” of what feels aligned for each of us. For the video, director Sam Macon and I were inspired by our shared love of the beauty of decrepit things, the ruins of American capitalism like sad malls & abandoned shopping centers. We shot a lot of the video in this huge parking lot between a strip club and an abandoned office building in the valley. We also drew inspiration from the film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye by Robert Altman — I love Elliott Gould in that film & the way L.A. operates as its own character. Since the song is all about a search for truth referencing a noir detective story felt right.”

The video’s director, Sam Macon, says of the video, “Southern California, Los Angeles specifically, has loomed large in our cultural imagination for so long and ‘Shatter’ was a great opportunity to explore the intersection of fantasy and reality. In a land devoted to make believe who’s to say what is what. I was really interested in juxtaposing the boosterism film reels of yesterday - orange groves, suburban landscaping, beauty pageants, and the like - with the modern reality of the southland - concrete sprawl, loneliness, unrealized dreams, etc. Yet, despite LA not being the paradise it was promised to be, the artists, dreamers, and outcasts still come here to ‘make it’ in one way or another.”

Check out the song and video below. Cadiz’s new LP, Hellbent & Moonbound is out now.